The Seagate Backup Plus Slim (2TB) ($129.99) is a compact repository for just about everything you need to save, like photos, term papers, and videos. This hard drive offers a generous amount of space in a chassis that's compact enough to slip into your pocket, and its proprietary Dashboard software also lets you save your media from your social networks and phone to the drive. While it's not as fast as the Seagate Backup Plus Fast, our Editors' Choice for portable external drives, and has only half that drive's 4TB capacity, the Backup Plus Slim's features and sleeker form factor still make it a great choice.

Design and Features Our review unit has a red painted aluminum top panel, but you can also get it in blue, black, or silver. This drive can easily slip into a front pants pocket and is barely noticeable in a commuter bag. It's compact, measuring about 0.5 by 4.5 by 3 inches (HWD) and weighing 6 ounces. That's almost identical to the Toshiba Canvio Slim II (1TB) and much slimmer than the Seagate Backup Plus Fast. It's also slimmer and smaller than the former Editors' Choice Seagate Backup Plus, since the new drive doesn't need to support the Universal Storage Module (USM) interface. The USM interface gave the older drive more flexibility and support for additional interfaces, like FireWire and Thunderbolt, but it made for a thicker and longer chassis.

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Most new laptops and desktop PCs have at least one USB 3.0 port, eSATA and FireWire are fading legacy ports, and Thunderbolt only appears on Macs and some workstation-class Windows systems. Thus, the drive supports USB 3.0 via a detachable 18-inch cable.

You can use the NTFS-formatted drive right away as a drag-and-drop backup drive, or reformat it to HFS+ and use it with Time Machine on a Mac. Seagate includes an installer for its Dashboard program, which can back up all your document files on a Windows PC. It doesn't back up program and operating system files, so business users may need a more specialized software package for full Windows system backup, like Acronis TrueImage.

On your Mac or Windows PC, the Dashboard program has added functionality for your social networks and phone. Once you install a free app on your Android or Apple phone, you'll be able to set up automatic backups to your drive over Wi-Fi or the cloud. Just make sure your computer is on with the drive mounted, and photos and videos will automatically backup to the drive. Dashboard can also check your Facebook and Flickr accounts for new photos and download those too if you wish. The Seagate Backup Plus Fast also comes with this program, but a software-free hard drive like the G-Technology G-Drive Mobile USB 3.0 (1TB) doesn't include this functionality. The Backup Plus Slim comes with a two-year warranty, which is a year shorter than other drives in this price range.

Pricing is competitive: At its $129.99 list price and 2TB capacity, the Backup Plus Slim costs about 6 cents per gigabyte. This compares well with the Seagate Backup Plus Fast (6.7 cents per gigabyte) and is significantly better than the G-Drive (11 cents per gigabyte).

Performance The Backup Plus Slim is competitive with other pocket-size drives, thanks to its generous space and USB 3.0 interface. It copied our standard 1.2GB test folder in 15 seconds. That's faster than the Toshiba Canvio Slim II, but a bit slower than the G-Technology G-Drive (10 seconds), which has a faster, 7,200rpm mechanism. The drive's score of 1,595 points on the PCMark 7 disk test was better than the Toshiba drive (1,488). On the Blackmagic disk test, the drive returned respectable 114Mbps read and 112Mbps write speeds, which is again a bit slower than the G-Drive. The drive is perfectly suited to backup and file-copy duties for most general users.

Highly portable and feature-filled, the Seagate Backup Plus Slim (2TB) is a solid choice if you're looking to back up your digital life. The Seagate Backup Plus Fast is still our top pick, however, by virtue of its higher capacity and speed for power users, but the Backup Plus Slim will work just fine for most everyone else.

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